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Are you prepared for retirement?

Wake up and smell the coffee you just spent five bucks on

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Whether the stock market meltdown has reduced your financial portfolio to a shadow of its former value or you never had a portfolio to begin with, the nation’s economic woes have been a wakeup call to all.

Findings in a recently released report indicate the decline in the stock market over the last six months of 2008 drastically affected the retirement outlook for the American middle class.

The retirement assets of recent and near retirees dipped between 14 and 17 percent during that period. The analysis, conducted by Ernst & Young LLP on behalf of the coalition Americans for Secure Retirement (ASR), indicates the decline reduces the chances that middle-class retirees will have enough money to last them through their lifetime.

The report also showed that a recently retired married couple earning $75,000 a year with a defined benefit plan has a 57 percent chance that it will have enough financial resources. The same couple, without a guaranteed source of retirement income, has just a 6 percent chance of financial success.

And no longer can we take for granted that jobs will always be plentiful, that our nation’s economic sizzle will never fizzle or that we’ll always have the ability to pay that credit card bill, car payment or mortgage. Never mind having enough to pay our kids’ way through college. That was a stretch even in good times.

The new economic realities are forcing us to take stock of what we value, our needs versus our wants and how we manage the checkbook.

It’s also a good time to review how we plan to pay for those retirement years and keep the long-term financial future of our families on the right path. For many Latinos, financial and retirement planning has not really been part of the equation. Who can you trust? Who has extra money to put in a retirement fund?

But instead of viewing those plans as a luxury for the rich, the reality is every person has a responsibility to consider how they’ll pay for the life they want in retirement. To do this well, many of us need to seek out reliable advice about how to go about it. Unfortunately, we don’t all have familia that can provide this expertise.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of Hispanics aged 65 and over will increase from 1.7 million in 2000 to 15.2 million by 2050. That makes us the fastest growing segment of the population at or near retirement. According to an American Community Survey for Arizona in 2007, the mean retirement income for Latinos was $15,256. It was $22,456 for the total population. So how will these aging Baby Boomers make ends meet when they are no longer working?

In the U.S., the three major sources of revenue for retirees are: 1) Social Security 2) pensions and 3) 401(k) plans or Individual Retirement Accounts (IRA).